Nouslife: Mirror neurons and humanity

06 May 2007

Mirror neurons and humanity

Occasionally I draw attention to this discovery of neurons in the human brain that fire up to mirror the actions etc of others being observed. The imortance is that it is the basic building block of human sociability, learning and empathy. As such it is also an important element in the forces that combine agglomerations of humans into more cohesive social groups and, if we take Walter Wink and William Stringfellow's theologies of 'the Powers', it is the lifeblood of a supra-human spiritual entity. So mark this article which pulls together some of the main ideas briefly.

“Human beings are not born exclusively with a set of reflexes or fixed action patterns,” says Meltzoff. “A key mechanism is learning from social others by observing.”
Meltzoff’s findings flew in the face of Jean Piaget’s solipsistic theories that people begin life in asocial isolation, slowly gaining an understanding of the relationship between the self and other. “Babies don’t become social,” Meltzoff says, “they’re social at birth.”
This early work set the stage for what he now calls the “Like Me” theory of child development. In the first months and years of life, babies realize that other people are like them. “From the moment we’re born, we’re organizing movement as ‘like me,’” or not like me, he says. “A tree blows, but it’s not moving like me. A ball flies, but it’s not moving like me. But a mother opens her hands, and suddenly the baby’s riveted. They can begin to learn.”
Over time, babies learn that they can act with intent and variety. They experience the ability to perform an action differently from the person they are imitating. Eventually they realize internal states, such as desire; further down the line they develop empathy.

However, we should be wary of running before we can walk on this, as the last part of the article reminds us in relation to potential explanations for things such as autism,

“People tend to overgeneralize when there’s some exciting finding,” says Knoblich. Mirror neurons play a clear and important role in social cognition, he says, but the scope of that role — and how it is influenced by other processes, such as language — remains to be seen. “There’s a lot of hype around the mirror system, but I don’t think it’s arrived yet in psychology enough.”